From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 16:43:53 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines In-Reply-To: References: <20170104024127.GN12264@mcvoy.com> <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20170105004353.GB6931@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 11:36:27AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Tue, 3 Jan 2017, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > I really wonder what the world would look like right now if Sun had open > > sourced SunOS 4.x and put energy behind it. [...] > > My guess is it would be a lot like FreeBSD. Not really. FreeBSD is open source and was way way behind SunOS. That's why so many Sun engineers were hugely butthurt when they were forced onto a far inferior System V source base. Scooter just didn't understand how much polish had gone into SunOS 4.x. It was a very talented group of engineers, many of whom had no social life (he says looking in the mirror :) so they poured all their energy into making SunOS great. I'm biased because I worked there, but I've run code on all of the major Unix offerings (AIX, IRIX, Ultrex, HP-UX and SunOS) and SunOS was hands down a better experience, inside the kernel, as a user of the syscalls, and in user space. It's what a geeky engineer would want with the polish needed to allow customers to have a good experience. I think a free SunOS would have had a cult following. I'd still be working on it. Sun's management just didn't realize what they were throwing away. Whimper.